Wessington Springs herald. (Wessington Springs, Aurora County, Dakota [S.D.]) 1883-1891, 1887-05-13
THE SALOON.
Ire Powerful Influence in Poll
tics-Let Us Crush 1t
Out.
To Destroy the Saloons we M"sI De'
s1roy the Rum Traffic by
Prohibition.
From the Toledo Blade. !

masses Of the American people that the sa-
loon must go, because of its terribly de-
basine influence 1t acts as blight upon
it's entire surroundings, wherever it may be.
Let a saloon be started at any given point,
and YOU will find there, especially during
the evenings, when men have leisure, the
shiftless, the idle. the discontinued, the
worthless representatives of the adjacent
community. You will not find the thrifty
mechanic, the industrious clerk or work
ingman, the energetic business man there.
But YOU will find their opposite every time.
If there is man who lis slipshod me,
chanic, an idler, man fond of talking and
airing his half baked opinions on matters
and things in general, they can oil be found
loating in the saloon.
And in the larger cities, where men are
more closely packed together than in rural
villages and the smaller towns, you will
find still worse class of characters in the
lower dives and saloons. AS you go down
the descending scale in your explorations,
you will find the coarse and ignorant class
of men, who have no aspirations higher
than the qualification of their appetises.
They can not read, or do not care to read.
The divine thirst for knowledge has never
taken possession of their besotted souls.
To eat and drink and be merry-especially
to drinks their highest ideal of earthly
happiness. This is an element too COM
mon in our American life, and one fraught
with great danger to our free institutions.
For all men possess the ballot, and these
men are not fitted for the trusts and duties
of citizenship. They are the ready prey
of demagogues and political self-seekers,
and from their ranks come the voters whose
ballots can be bought for rum.
As you go still lower, scaling the deeps
of human depravity as exhibited in the
frequenters or the lowest class of saloons,
you find the distinctively vicious and Grim
inal classes. You find men who will not
work, even if honest labor at fair pay be
offered them. They prefer to live in dis
honest ways-by theft and robbery, upon
the price Of the shame of their wives or
daughters, or in some other of the vile
ways known only to the slums of a great
city. Yet these men WELD the ballot, and
the ticket, dropped into the box by one of
them, has just as much power in deciding
who shall fill our executive offices, who
shall sit upon the seat of justice IN our
courts, who shall be trusted with the grave
responsibility of making our laws, rs the
ticket in the hands of an honest, self-re-
| specting, educated, and intelligent citizen.
The saloon is an evil in numberless
ways: but especially is it an evil in that it
makes itself focus, rallying- point, for
| these dangerous classes of society. Not
only of the passively dangerous, the ignor-
ant and unlearned, but the actively danger
ous-the men who turn of their own free
choice to vice and crime rather than to
honest labor and pure life. 1t brings
these men together, it affords them COM
mon meeting point, it encourages their
combination to compass evil and wrong
doing that would be impossible or i'm
practicable to but one alone, or two or
an evil in that it is club-room for the
vicious and criminal classes, primary
school wherein the foolish, the ignorant,
| become inculcatsd with the warped views
of life held by the criminal classes, and in
the end become recruits for this army of
vice, which is q menace to the peace and
prosperity of the nation.
But the evil, great as it is, does not stop
here. The natural influence of association
is supplemented by far stronger force,
which cements these evil elements together
as political power. The facts that men
loaf in saloons, that saloon loafer is
venal, and can be purchased, and that the
saloon-keepers exercise strong influence
over this whole class of bar-room habitues,
long ago were seized upon by the political
tricksters, the men who pack the caucuses
and make a living out of traffic in the
votes of the worst classes of the voting
population. Nor did it escape the saloon-
keepers themselves. The readiest road to
municipal Office in New York City was long
ago declared to be through keeping GIN
mill in one of the poorer wards of the city,
densely populated by the ignorant, de-
PRAYED, and foreign-born classes of people.
The famous doodle" board of aldermen of
1884 was largely made up of successful
saloon keepers, who reached the positions
they disgraced through the votes Of the
saloon-loafer element.
When man becomes slave to rum, he
loses all that high sense of honor which
would make him scorn to sell his vote, or
take bride, or otherwise disgrace his
manhood. When man has soaked his
physical system with alcoholic poison, his
mental and moral nature shares the deteri-
Grafton of the body. The mind is imbruted.
the morals destroyed. The man is WILLING.
in order to satiate his burning thirst for
rum, to sell his very soul to the man who
will supply him with the accursed stuff.
10 such a man the sale of his ballot is Il
trivial thing to do. And when one comes
to consider the number of saloons in any
city, and calculate the number of vicious.
depraved, ignorant, drunken hangers on
| SlAat uopcuu upon oacQ, the magnitude of
this saloon vote" begins to dawn upon his
mind; and if he De thinking man. he
cannot help being shocked and startled at
the revelation.
The saloon is q club-room for all the
dangerous and depraved classes of the
community. Through the absolute domi.
nation which the rum thirst exercises over
every man who has become victim of tho
rum habit, these classes can, as a rule. ha
voted by the aloon-keeper, or by some no.
llt1cal Wire puller who is hand in glove
with the saloonist, as absolutely as if thew
had no will of their own. We have here
the secret of the misgovernment of orr
citIes' OF the wasteful extravaganza in mu-
nlcipal affairs, the result of Unworthy and
seli- seeking men getting into office through
s nI means, which burdens our taxpayers
There is but one remedy for this State of
.hings, and it is to crush the saloon. De-
stroy the headquarters Of these dissolnta
ana degraded men, and you destroy the
BOND OF cohesion which holds them to- o
gether: Individually they are not power-
h Iua. All the danger arises from their com
oMatlon, under unprincipled control.
Inc saloon is political factor of dire
polIent to the nation. To DESTROY its nol;to
ical influence the saloon itself will have tn
De destroyed. And if we set ont to f;nJ
ways and means to compass it's destruct;nn
we will speedily see that there is bnt ', ons